Why Gun Control Can Never Work

Even if it is a good idea (it's not) and the reason is pictured below: Let me back up a minute. The photo above, entitled "Woman worker poses with finished Sten submachinegun, Small Arms Plant, Long Branch, Ontario, Canada, 1942."
The Sten is the classic example of how low-tech guns can be. This was a weapon produced in huge numbers (over a million) for the troops as well the French Resistance.
When all the R&D work was finished, they sold for approximately $3.50 and took a whopping five man-hours to build, start to finish. Today, any half-competent machinist could crank these things out at a rate of one or two per weekend.
More Sten pics in a bit. Let's get back to "the photo below":

What you're looking at is a homemade, single shot, break-open, 12 guage shotgun. No glamor queen by any means - and, obviously, absolutely no fun to shoot. It's safe to assume, however that anyone standing in front of it - within fifteen feet or so - would have his entire day ruined after this monster went off and left you unable to write or hold a spoon for a week or so.
My point: This thing is crude. It's nothing but plumbing parts and off-the-shelf hardware, welded together. It was cocked by pulling back the plunger. The little knob at the top was the "trigger" so I assume this was a two-handed weapon. Christ, I'd put in the bench-vise rather than hold it.
Crude though it was, it as well as other homegrown weaponry served the EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston - National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) well during the "troubles" in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959.
So, guns don't have to be sophisticated to be effective. They do however have to be so to be sexy, but that's a different argument.
Back to the Sten. My favorite picture of a Sten in action:

This photo is so precious. I trot it out to shut-up French bashers every chance I get. Notice the dapper French partisan standing by the car wih his Sten while the American LT is is obviously hiding behind him. I love it. By the way, the young butter-bar's mug graces the section on the 1911, on the new and far more annoying website of the Springfield Armory. They cropped out the Froggie though.
Okay, enough of my bad attitude: I got this next from the same place I got the SMLE "sniper" pic in the column to the left (right below the "Impeach Cheney" button.

So, the gunmaking genie's out of the bottle.
What's better yet, the other day I discovered this website. This guy may be a new hero of mine. He went to prison for four years in the defense of gun ownership - in Britian no less - where they don't have the 2nd amendment to fall back on (Once a barrister friend told me "You know someone's argument is in trouble when they start invoking the constitution").
Anyway, go to this guy's site. He sells downloads for lots of guns but there are freebies on the site as well. He has available for free a more sophistcated version of the Cypriot arm-breaker pictured above.
If that's too primative go here. For around $400 you can buy a complete M1911, needing only to have two grooves milled (or filed) into the frame forging and assembled. The beauty part is this: You'll end up with a "Colt 45" made to military specs with no paper trail and no serial number. Yes, it's legal, unless you sell it, but who'd want to?
Anyway, a quote from Karl Hess from a famous Playboy inview that I read in '76 or so:
"When guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns"
And last - and I really mean it (this is a "Minnesota Long Goodbye" coutesy of Garrison Keilor) a poem that speaks for itself:

Ode to a Sten Gun
By Gunner. S.N. Teed

You wicked piece of vicious tin!
Call you a gun? Don't make me grin.
You're just a bloated piece of pipe.
You couldn't hit a hunk of tripe.
But when you're with me in the night,
I'll tell you pal, you're just alright!

Each day I wipe you free of dirt.
Your dratted corners tear my shirt.
I cuss at you and call you names,
You're much more trouble than my dames.
But boy, do I love to hear you yammer
When you 're spitting lead in a business manner.

You conceited pile of salvage junk.
I think this prowess talk is bunk.
Yet if I want a wall of lead
Thrown at some Jerry's head
It is to you I raise my hat;
You're a damn good pal...
You silly gat!

The Ghost Roundhouses

I've just joined AA..."Anoraks Anonymous". Thirty years ago I thought an anorak was just a pullover windbreaker. Now I find it's a Brit term for... Well, it's too embarrassing.
Here's the definition from Wikipedia: "slang, an anorak is a person, typically a man, who has unfathomable interest in arcane, detailed information regarded as boring by the rest of the population - and who feels compelled to spout said detailed information to anyone within earshot."
All that humiliating housekeeping out of the way, here are the results of a recent low-key hobby of mine. Call it Google Map archeology... or... a bloody waste of time, whatever. And speaking of wasting time; what are you cubicle dwellers doing here? Get back to work. I'm the designated screw-off around here.
Anyway, this came about as a result of an article in our local paper concerning a "toxic bloom" in the groundwater of a neighborhood near to the railroad switchyard. Aparently, some industrial degreasers, spilled over the course of a century or so were filling the crawlspaces of houses with carcinogenic fumes. The source of said toxic stuff being a roundhouse. A roundhouse, says I. How cool. If you don't know what a roundhouse is...then you're an ignorant putz, not fit to talk to an anorak like me.
Sorry, lost my head. Again, here's a definition from our old friends at Wikipedia: "A roundhouse is a building used by railroads for servicing locomotives. Roundhouses are large, circular or semicircular structures that were traditionally located surrounding or adjacent to turntables. The defining feature of the traditional roundhouse was the turntable, which facilitates access when the building is used for repair facilities or for storage of steam locomotives."
Now, I've been a train geek most of my life (anorak, remember?) so I decided to see if maybe, just maybe, I could Google Map this thing and see if this offending roundhouse left a "footprint".
Lordy did it. I decided to pursue this further and see how many I could find. My next attempt was a roundhouse that I probably passed at least once a day in the days when trains were more interesting that girls. That is to say, in my original hometwown, Missoula Montana.
So, I tried to think of railroad towns I knew off and checked them out. I've found a few I'm especially proud off, due to the fact they're almost gone.
So, what follows is my "life list" of roundhouse footprints, in the order of, at least part of, their significance:




I'm going to jump in here and disrupt your rapt gazing at these industrial relics to say that the next has a significance the others don't have. For one, it's still extant and serves as a railroad museum. Additionally it's mentioned in a classic song from the 1870's called "The Dreary Black Hills"
"The roundhouse at Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight;
On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills,
Each day they keep starting for the dreary Black Hills."








Those were the easy ones. Now for the few that I think I was lucky to find. God, I'm pathetic.





The real feather in my cap is this: Omaha...



So, there's my madness. Anoraks of the world, recognize the unique qualities of all the knowledge you possess and quit thinking that, just because no one sits next to you on the bus, that they don't need to hear this. This is our heritage, man.
The people must be told!
Okay, I'm overwrought. I'm done.
"No knowledge is useless"
Rosetta Stone
1846

Hiding in plain sight

"Camouflage is a form of deception. The word camouflage comes from the French word camoufler meaning "to disguise'"
Lately I've been obsessed with my old ama mater, the USN. Don't tell me I misused "alma mater" I don't care.
Brought about by a side effect of my reference to one of my favorite books, "The Sand Pebbles". Good customer read same on my recomendation and enjoyed it. I love it when that happens (Hi Andrew. Tell Carlos to e-mail me, damnit).
Anyway, it brought about heavy nostalgia for "The Old Navy", the one I never experienced. Hell, I only went on one ship the entire four years I was in, and that was as a visitor. I was a shore sailor. But the whole romance of the "Gray and Underway" has always captivated me.
To this end, I'm going to bore you with lots and lots of pics of "Dazzle Camouflage".
The first impression, when looking at these is: "But, They're not hidden. I can see them". The problem is that one can't "camouflage" in the ocean. The light and atmospheric conditions change constantly, so the scheme that worked in the morning will have you looking like a turd in a punchbowl by noon.
But, in the first war the real danger was from U-boats so the gentleman pictured first, British Naval Officer and Artist, Norman Wilkinson, came up with the scheme of "Razzle-Dazzle".
The problem with being a U-boat captain wasn't seeing the ships. They were hard to miss. It was plotting their speed and heading and making all the complex calculations necessary so that the torpedo, essentially a seagoing bomb, would be at the same place as the target at the approriate moment. Sort of like getting all of Thanksgiving dinner on the table at the same time.
What the dazzle scheme did was to make it unclear, especially through a periscope at perhaps a mile distant, what was the bow of the ship and what direction the ship was heading. Check the French cruiser next up to see this in its purest form. Where is the pointy end of this boat?
The first pics are WW1 where they were more fanciful. The later WW2 dazzle was adopted after the Japanese had lost air capability and were pretty much a sub navy.
Kind of boring - black and gray, but in the spirit.

One of those old four-stacker tin cans. Oh yeah.....




We'll get the boring WW2 stuff now, but we'll start with one of the old wood-decked, bird-farms that docked at Subic Bay, Republic of the Phillippines during my tenure (1973-4).


On this battlewagon they're slipping into woodland camo...losing the vision.


I'm going to wrap this up with a non-camo shot: Everyone's seen all the pictures of the USS Arizona as Tourist Attraction/Mass Grave. How about one of her at her ass-kicking best - even though her only fight was the one that sunk her.